Survivalist - 12 - The Rebellion (22 page)

Kurinami saluted and Hartman dropped his hand. “Captain—Elaine Halverson, myself and the remainder of Colonel Mann’s force have been observing The Complex. There seemed to be considerable troop movement toward

what we understand is the new government building. We detected what might have been gunfire. But there has been no signal from Colonel Mann.”

“Then,” Hartman began, drawing his gloves slowly from his hands, “I suggest that we continue with the standartenfuehrer and the Herr Doctor’s plan as originally set forth.” He slapped dust from his left thigh with the gloves. “I shall move my men into position—the bulk of my force is already moving up. We have, however, unfortunate news. Monitoring of radio signals from North America indicates that Hauptsturmfuehrer Sturm has acted independently of his orders and after suffering a significant defeat at the hands of the Russians upon returning and realizing that the standartenfuehrer was returned to Argentina, he attacked the standartenfuehrer’s remaining forces. The hauptsturmfuehrer then proceeded to attack the Eden Project site.”

“Damn,” Kurinami muttered.

“Hauptsturmfuehrer Helmut Sturm—he is a good officer. But, unfortunately, he is also a dedicated Nazi, among the most dedicated. But we idle here, I think, too long. Shall we?” Hartman raised his eyebrows, then smiled.

Kurinami shifted the selector of his assault rifle back to safety.

As he started back up along the road, walking at Hartman’s left, he could not help but wonder how many of the Eden personnel were dead, had survived five hundred years of criogenic sleep to rebuild a world—but were senselessly slaughtered.

“Stupid,” he sighed. The road was steep and long ahead and he was already tired.

Madison drew the shawl tighter about her shoulders, despite the coat beneath it. Cold—she thought it was not

just the temperature, but fear. Concealed beneath her right palm was the small derringer pistol Paul had given her to use. A raw cold wind gusted along the plain now, the wind getting up under her skirt, billowing it, making her legs suddenly cold. She kept walking.

As she could see in better definition the two Eden Project personnel beside the camouflage-painted pick-up truck which belonged to Father Rourke, she forced her mind elsewhere. The baby—she was certain she carried life within her, life given her by Michael, life she would return to him. When he had been shot and she and the others had been taken off by the evil Russian man, she had craved death for herself and the baby. She had thought Michael was dead. And he had given more life to her than the life which would soon swell her abdomen.

Her left hand—the right held the derringer—felt at her body.

Madison raised her head, throwing her hair back into the wind, setting a smile on her face.

Michael and Paul had told her what to do, but she had her own ideas. She hoped they would work.

One of the white coveralled, green-coated Eden personnel—a man—turned from leaning against the truck and called to her, “What can we do for you, miss? This truck is off limits to your family.”

“Ohh, please—I need something from inside the truck.”

“What is it you need, miss? We’ll get it for you,” the guard insisted as she continued to approach. But she shortened her steps, to make them appear more hesitant, to make herself appear more fearful than she really was— which was a considerable amount.

“It’s a very personal thing that I need. It’s very small.” She hadn’t figured out what it was yet, but that wasn’t important. Women, as she had quickly learned from the girl she considered like a sister, Annie Rourke, always had

very personal things. And men were always eager to know about them.

“I’m sorry, miss, if you can’t tell me, then you’ll have to take it up with Captain Dodd, OK?”

Madison stopped six feet or so from him, smiling embarrassedly. “I, ahh, I really need it, ahh, can I tell just you— if I really have to. Can I whisper it to you, sir?”

She had learned also that men liked flattery.

The man she had spoken with looked at the second man, shrugged his shoulders, then nodded his head. “OK—what can I do for you, miss?”

She approached him, looking at the ground as though studying her boots. She stopped directly before him—he was very tall. “May I whisper it in your ear, please? I’m very, very—well, embarrassed.”

“Fine,” the man agreed and he bent slightly forward, Madison raising on her tiptoes, touching her left hand to his shoulder as she brought her lips close to his left ear— and she stabbed the ADC .45 derringer against his left cheekbone. “What the—”

“I will shoot you. It’s already cocked. And the caliber is .45—drop your rifle and tell your friend that he should please do the same.”

“Shit.” She watched his eyes flicker—hers didn’t. “Drop your gun, Harry.”

She heard his hit the ground, saw the second man— Harry—do the same.

She had one of the duplicate sets of keys Father Rourke had wisely had prepared for his fine truck. She would tell them to lie down on the ground, then she would take their rifles and then she would drive the truck away. Paul would have his second High Power pistol, Michael would have an assault rifle. She would have one too. And then they would, the three of them, get the other weapons and the things they needed and go after her friend, Annie.

But Madison was always raised to be a polite girl and not to be rude. So, as she held the derringer just below the man’s left eye, she smiled and said, “Thank you both so very much.” Neither said, “You’re welcome” or anything even remotely like that.

She was cold—and she felt horribly embarrassed, sitting there trussed into the seat of the Russian helicopter, unable to move, unable to pull her clothes into position. She had no idea how long Forrest Blackburn had been gone—but she found herself wishing for his return. She was powerless to free herself—and if he were not to return, she would die here, strapped into this seat with her clothes up to her crotch and her panties pulled down. She would simply die of starvation or exposure—or perhaps the new world held other terrors she couldn’t imagine. For him to violate her, he would have to free her—at least she assumed that he would.

And then she would have a chance. Maybe.

She kept repeating to herself that even though soon her last name would be Rubenstein, inside she would always be a Rourke. And a Rourke never gave up. She squinted her eyes shut—if she could concentrate on something besides fear and the cold, she would be all right, she knew.

She pictured Paul’s face. It was a good face. She realized she was smiling. Someday the thinning hair would probably be gone and there would only be a fringe of hair and she could kid him about being bald and rub the top of his head and tell him she was shining it for him.

She wondered how it would be to make love.

Paul—he had told her one night, when he had spoken to her and there had been no light at all by which to see his face, that he had never.

She wanted—she wanted to give herself to him, not after

someone had taken her.

Annie Rourke opened her eyes suddenly—she had seen Forrest Blackburn in her mind and now he stood beside the bubble, opening the passenger side door. “Miss me, Annie?”

“Go to hell,” she snapped as he undid the gag.

“No, I found my supplies. We’ll fly there now. Should take us about two minutes or so. Then we load up.” He rested his right hand on her naked right thigh and she tried to recoil from him but couldn’t. “And then we’re off to old mother Russia. And by the time we get there, Annie—well. You’d better decide. Either you warm up to me or you’re dead—and I’ll make sure it’s very unpleasantly dead.”

She wanted to tell him—go ahead, kill me now. She

didn’t. She said nothing. She had something else inside her

that was a part of being a Rourke—patience. She focused

her attention on Natalia. Natalia would know what to do.

Annie had learned that her mind, in ways she had always

heard were impossible, could what could not be

seen. She remembered the dream of Michael in danger. And he had been.

Annie Rourke closed her eyes—she tried to see Natalia. Natalia would know. And after a while, she felt the pressure of Blackburn’s hand gone from her thigh and heard the whirring of the rotor blades. In her mind, she thought she saw Natalia, wearing a once-pretty black dress. But there was white powder on the dress and the dress was somehow torn from the hem to the waist. Natalia—Annie focused her mind on one thought. Natalia …

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, regretting for the moment her abilities, walked ahead of the seven others. Frau Sturm carried one of the healthy if somewhat small twin

girls, Hugo the other one. Sarah Rourke towed along the other two Sturm children, Bertol and Willy—her wounded arm in a makeshift sling. John Rourke and Wolfgang Mann carried the stretcher—it was plastic and inflatable, making a transparent air mattress with an integral pillow which was supported by lightweight stretcher rods made of some type of high tensile-strength aluminum she guessed. On the stretcher was Helene Sturm. She had delivered two babies.

And Natalia, because of her abilities, had let the other two women carry babies or shepherd the children while she carried a gun.

Barefoot still, she moved along the tunnel, her stride no longer impeded by the dress she wore—the skirt, slit with her knife from hem to waist to give freedom of movement during the fight with the guards in the first basement, was stained with plaster dust now.

In her hands she held one of the German assault pistols—it was a decent weapon, but the magazine capacity was too small for selective fire, she thought, even with the enforced three-shot burst control.

And she had never liked weapons with built-in burst control. Somehow the feel wasn’t right.

And she knew a great deal about the feel of weapons, moreso than the feel of babies. She looked back once—the infants, wrapped in towels taken from the torture chamber where Helene Sturm had delivered them, were so tiny and fragile.

Natalia had watched as John Rourke had brought the babies from Helene Sturm’s body, watched the pain in Helene Sturm’s eyes, and the joy there too.

She envied other women—their fragility and their strength. She kept walking.

Over her head, pipes ran, the pipes steaming, the air around her cold as she walked ahead. “Up ahead, there,

Fraulein Major—take the turn to the right,” Wolfgang Mann called from behind her.

By the dim light of the bare, bulblike fixtures overhead interlaced between the pipes, Natalia began following the tunnel where it forked to the right.

Troops had been coming as Wolfgang Mann—Natalia had carried the stretcher with John Rourke until they had entered the tunnel—had led them to the far end of the second basement. A panel of concrete blocks moved on weights when Mann had inserted a bayonet into one of the seams between the blocks. And they had passed through into the tunnel. Then with John Rourke helping, the stretcher set down, Frau Mann and Hugo holding the twin girls, Mann had pushed the panel of blocks back into position. She had lent her own strength to it as well.

Mann had explained, smiling in the light of the hand torches which were necessary in that portion of the tunnel because there was no overhead light, that all construction was supervised by the army engineers and he had been able to have the secret passageway built into the foundation.

They had climbed for some time—the younger boys tiring, their capture and subsequent rescue taking its toll— the tunnel rising sharply. There had been another panel of concrete blocks that had to be moved aside and they had entered the service tunnel where water, electrical power and communications lines were run. Closing the panel as they had the first one, they had moved ahead, Mann warning that troops could have anticipated them and be waiting along the tunnel.

Barefoot except for the stockings which were little better than shredded now, she was grateful that animal life—at least here—was gone. Because the tunnel would otherwise have been infested with rats. Dark beyond the dull glow of the lights spaced every fifty yards or so, damp, warm enough.

She kept walking, and the tunnel bend stopped at another block wall.

“This is the last of the panels,” Wolfgang Mann called from behind her.

She could hear John telling Frau Sturm in what sounded to her to be perfect German to rest easily, that all would be well. She heard the click of John Rourke’s boots as he approached. Mann was beside him. In Mann’s hand was the bayonet that had been secured to his left shin with strips of elastic. He operated one of the hand torches, scanning along the seams between the blocks. “Ahh— here,” he murmured, as if speaking to himself, inserting the tip of the bayonet—it was similar to those used with the M-16, she noted mechanically—and prying. The concrete blocks began to move, as though somehow an irregularly shaped section were being cut from a chessboard.

Natalia threw her weight to it, as did John Rourke, and the panel moved move rapidly.

“Let’s go,” John Rourke whispered, running back toward Frau Sturm and the stretcher. Mann ran behind him, Natalia stepping through the opening in the wall surface— a cave, at the end or mouth perhaps a hundred yards distant, gray light. She moved the muzzle of the machine pistol left and right against the darkness. There was no movement.

“Come ahead,” she whispered into the opening behind her.

John, carrying the base of the stretcher, Frau Sturm— Rourke had given her a B-Complex shot and a mild sedative as a relaxant—and then Wolfgang Mann, his handsome face in sharp contrast to the stained and ill-fitting old man’s clothes he wore.

The stretcher was set down again as Frau Mann and Hugo passed through carrying the mercifully silent newborns. Then Sarah with Willy and Bertol. Then with John

Rourke and Wolfgang Mann, Natalia worked her weight against the panel of blocks, pushing it back into place.

For some reason, she began thinking of Annie.

What a wonderful young woman Annie had become.

They began moving through the cave, Natalia again taking the point. Mann called out, “Just outside, we travel up a path and then into the trees. There is a cave concealed there where there is safety.”